John Updike: The Collected Stories

From John Updike's first collection, The Same Door, in 1959, to My Father's Tears, published 50 years later, the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of the Rabbit novels also proved himself to be a master of the short story ("our second Hawthorne," as Philip Roth described him), earning the PEN/Malamud Award and multiple O. Henry Prizes. In this slipcased, two-volume collection are 186 stories by Updike, presented in the order in which they were finished and with his revisions, from "Ace in the Hole" (1953) a sketch of a Rabbit-like ex-basketball player written when Updike was a Harvard senior, to "The Full Glass" (2008), the author's "toast to the visible world, his own impending disappearance from it be damned." Updike's evocations of small-town Pennsylvania life, and of his own religious, artistic, and sexual awakening, transfixed readers of The New Yorker and of the early collections Pigeon Feathers (1962) and The Music School (1966). In these and the works that followed—the formal experiments and wickedly tart tales of suburban adultery in Museums and Women (1972) and Problems (1979), the portraits of middle-aged couples in love and at war with aging parents and rebellious children in Trust Me (1987) and The Afterlife (1994), and the fugue-like stories of memory, desire, travel, and unquenched thirst for life in Licks of Love (2000) and My Father's Tears (2009)—Updike displayed the virtuosic command of character, dialogue, and sensual description that was his signature.